If you want to understand where the iPhone came from, head to the rolling hills of Northern California's Mendocino County and the home of Hog Farm - one of the US's oldest, and most successful, hippy communes. "Hippies were setting up communes and dropping out of mainstream society to build their own communities," says Justin McGuirk, lead curator at London's Design Museum. McGuirk, 41, has spent more than a year studying the recent history of Silicon Valley design for a major exhibition. "That was one of the key factors in 60s counterculture. You can trace that through everything we're seeing today in Silicon Valley, which is about individual and personal liberation. The iPhone is a quintessential example of that."

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Covering 900 square metres of the museum's new home in South Kensington, the California: Designing Freedom exhibition brings together key objects from the past six decades to explain how and why the iPhone is the way it is. Take Susan Kare's gridded notebook, which contains sketches of the Apple Macintosh's original desktop icons. "It's the first show to try and do justice to the influence of California in contemporary design culture," McGuirk explains.

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From Apple to Facebook, the success of Silicon Valley firms doesn't just affect the technology we use, but also the way we behave and respond to design. In a world with 1.86 billion Facebook users, a billion iPhones sold and 40,000 Google searches every second, it's hard to avoid California's influence. A central theme to the exhibition is personal liberation, an idea that was championed in those early communes, and which has trickled down to the most powerful companies. "A key thing for us is the Whole Earth Catalog," McGuirk says. Released in 1968, the magazine became an essential text for California's self-sufficient, DIY culture. "The idea of personal liberation is intrinsic to a Californian attitude," McGuirk says. "And the entrepreneur is the pinnacle of Californian individualism."

The exhibition, which runs until October 15, is both a celebration and a critique of Californian design and culture. For Brendan McGetrick, a curator who worked with McGuirk on the exhibition, Californian design is not just rooted in hippy communes, but also in the military. "Everything that at the time was associated with the military industrial complex could be personalised and democratised. That idea resonates through almost everything in the show," McGetrick says. The microchip is a prime example: until the 70s, they were used largely to guide missiles. Decades later, they are integral to billions of devices.

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One of the exhibition's bolder claims is that, in some ways, we are all Californians. "The use of smartphones and social media is a global phenomenon coming from Silicon Valley that has affected the way billions of people behave," McGuirk says. "Taking a selfie and posting it on Facebook is a quintessential Californian behaviour." Liberation, in Californian terms, also has a downside. The exhibition features adverts for the Apple PowerBook and Newton, devices that gave people freedom to work in their own way. "It's a freedom that also imprisons you," McGuirk says. "You never escape work any more. These assumptions are built into all of these things and they're coming from a specific ideology." He argues that these elements create friction in the story of California's design success.

Apple and Google are understandable fixations, but the exhibition takes a broader view. "Trying to make it about California, rather than doing a tech show, creates surprises," McGuirk says. The differences between Southern and Northern Californian design reveal the clash between the neo-modernist graphic design of San Franciscan smartphones and the idiosyncratic approach of LA-based creatives. "Northern California makes the tools and Southern California has the freedom to be roguishly individualistic," McGuirk says.

This to and fro between design cultures has even changed the way we speak. Corita Kent's 1965 screenprint "Powerup" is a political artwork that evolved into a description for turning on a computer. From the Black Panthers to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, 60s political movements are also an influence on modern Californian design. One example is a booklet, given out at a 60s gay-rights protest to defend against police harassment, which is echoed today in an American Civil Liberties Union app to report police abuse.

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Ultimately, the exhibition celebrates the success of Californian design. "So many companies have studios in LA and San Francisco because they feel that's where they need to be," McGuirk adds. "'Designed in California' is not just a Californian thing any more."